Research tips

 

A blog by Rob J Hyndman 

Twitter Gplus RSS

Posts Tagged ‘journals’:


Blog aggregators

Published on 15 May 2012

A very use­ful way of keep­ing up with blogs in a par­tic­u­lar area is to sub­scribe to a blog aggre­ga­tor. These will syn­di­cate posts from a large num­ber of blogs and pro­vide links back to the orig­i­nal sources. So you only need to sub­scribe once to get all the good stuff in that area. There are now sev­eral blog aggre­ga­tors avail­able that might be of inter­est to read­ers here. And this blog is now syn­di­cated on sev­eral other sites includ­ing those listed below.

 
1 Comment  comments 

Google scholar metrics

Published on 2 April 2012

Google has pro­duced another great tool for researchers, this time pro­vid­ing some met­rics on jour­nal cita­tions. Google Scholar Met­rics allows you to search on jour­nals rather than arti­cles, and to see the aver­age or median h-​​​​index for each jour­nal. For exam­ple, a search on “fore­cast­ing” yields the fol­low­ing results:

 
2 Comments  comments 

Following authors on Google Scholar

Published on 31 January 2012

A great new fea­ture has been added to Google Scholar Cita­tions. For those authors who have set up a cita­tions page, it is now pos­si­ble to get email alerts for any new arti­cles they pub­lish, or for any new cita­tions of their arti­cles. So you can track cita­tions to your own work this way, and stay up-​​​​to-​​​​date with key authors in your field. Set­ting up a Google Cita­tions page is super-​​​​easy and was already worth doing. This new func­tion­al­ity is another rea­son to do it. After all, as researchers we want peo­ple to read our stuff, so we might as well make it as easy as pos­si­ble for peo­ple to find what we write. To set up your Google Cita­tions page, go to scholar​.google​.com/​c​i​t​a​tions. To fol­low an author, find their cita­tions page and look for the “Fol­low this author” box at the top right of the page. Hope­fully, Google will add RSS feeds as an option in the future as I’d much rather get alerts that way then by yet more email in my inbox.

 
3 Comments  comments 

Refereeing a journal article

Published on 20 January 2012

I’ve writ­ten briefly on this before. For an excel­lent and more detailed dis­cus­sion of what is involved, there is a series of excel­lent posts on Pat Thomson’s blog: Ref­er­ee­ing a jour­nal arti­cle part 1: read­ing Ref­er­ee­ing a jour­nal arti­cle part 2: mak­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion Ref­er­ee­ing a jour­nal arti­cle part 3: writ­ing the feed­back If every reviewer fol­lowed her advice, my life as an edi­tor would be much eas­ier, and the qual­ity of research would be improved.

 
1 Comment  comments 

Researcher portals

Published on 26 November 2011

A researcher por­tal is a web­site that attempts to list all the pub­li­ca­tions of a given researcher. Some por­tals also allow shar­ing papers, inter­act­ing with other researchers, cal­cu­lat­ing cita­tion sta­tis­tics, etc. Every researcher wants their work read and cited, so these web­sites can be use­ful tools for get­ting your work noticed. They can also func­tion as a de facto home page if you don’t already have a per­sonal web­site. Con­versely, they can be a good way to find new work by researchers in your field. How­ever, unless a site pro­vides a rel­a­tively com­plete list of your pub­li­ca­tions, and cov­ers a large pro­por­tion of the research com­mu­nity in your dis­ci­pline, it is of limited value.

 
3 Comments  comments 

The scourge of the academic publishers

Published on 30 August 2011

Aca­d­e­mic pub­lish­ing is built on an old model where pub­lish­ers were needed to print and dis­trib­ute jour­nals to libraries. Under this sys­tem, it makes sense that the jour­nals are dis­trib­uted by pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies who charge fees for their work. On the other hand, the aca­d­e­mics who write for the jour­nals, the peer review­ers and (almost all) edi­tors, have always con­tributed their time and exper­tise with­out cost. Essen­tially, they are being paid by uni­ver­si­ties and other research orga­ni­za­tions to do this work. While we had print-​​​​based dis­tri­b­u­tion, this model largely worked. But now we work elec­tron­i­cally, the model is broken.

 
10 Comments  comments 

Beware of junk journals and publishers

Published on 12 August 2011

Today I received the fol­low­ing email: Dear Pro­fes­sor, 1. Antarc­tica Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­ics 2. Archimedes Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­ics 3. Bessel Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­ics 4. Cay­ley Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­ics 5. Dio­phan­tus Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­ics We are charg­ing only $3 per page, which is very cheap when com­pared to some money ori­ented jour­nals. Fur­ther we request you to with­draw your paper from other jour­nals keep­ing in view of high page charges. You can sub­mit your research papers to our online jour­nals. We also con­sider paper from Sta­tis­tics and Com­puter Sci­ence. I won­der how many math­e­mati­cians actu­ally live in Antarc­tica for them to war­rant their own journal!

 
1 Comment  comments 

Recommended survey papers

Published on 25 July 2011

Sur­vey arti­cles are par­tic­u­larly help­ful in get­ting a foothold in a new research area, or in look­ing for impor­tant papers that you may have over­looked. What­ever area of research you are in, look out for sur­vey papers and jour­nals ded­i­cated to pub­lish­ing sur­vey papers.

 
1 Comment  comments 

Authorship ethics

Published on 11 January 2011

With the con­stant pres­sure on aca­d­e­mics to pub­lish research papers, there is a temp­ta­tion for research groups to include “coau­thors” who have not really made any con­tri­bu­tion to the man­u­script. This seems more preva­lent in some fields (e.g., the health sci­ences) than oth­ers. Occa­sion­ally, I am asked to add an author to a paper that has already been accepted for pub­li­ca­tion in the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing. I am very reluc­tant to do this as it is hard to imag­ine how some­one could be left off a paper while it goes through sev­eral revi­sions, only to be remem­bered after the paper is accepted. It looks like a last ditch attempt to get some­one a pub­li­ca­tion rather than a gen­uine research con­tri­bu­tion. Most uni­ver­si­ties now have an author­ship pol­icy. The author­ship pol­icy at Monash Uni­ver­sity includes the fol­low­ing state­ments. Attri­bu­tion of author­ship … in all cases author­ship must be based on mak­ing a sub­stan­tial intel­lec­tual con­tri­bu­tion to the work described and tak­ing sole or joint respon­si­bil­ity for that con­tri­bu­tion or, where appro­pri­ate, the work as a whole. Accord­ingly, author­ship must be based upon a sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tion and respon­si­bil­ity for at least one, and usu­ally more than one, of the fol­low­ing activ­i­ties: Con­cep­tion and design of the project; Analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of research data; Draft­ing

(More)…

 
1 Comment  comments 

Becoming a referee

Published on 10 January 2011

I reg­u­larly get emails from peo­ple want­ing to be ref­er­ees for the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing, usu­ally with an accom­pa­ny­ing CV. This is not how the process works. Ref­er­ees are almost always selected because they have pre­vi­ously writ­ten papers on a sim­i­lar topic to the man­u­script under review. If you want to be a ref­eree, then write good papers and get them pub­lished in schol­arly jour­nals. Very quickly you will be invited to ref­eree papers in the same jour­nals. But until you have demon­strated your own research skills, no edi­tor is going to trust you to assess the research of someone else.

 
No Comments  comments 
« Older Entries